With the advancement of Information Technology (IT) and wireless communication technologies, handheld devices such as Smartphones, Tablets, and PDA and the like have been utilized effectively not only to facilitate voice communication but also to provide other services like social networking, e-commerce, and video games etc. These devices provide enhanced user experience, support mobility and enable faster communication. These devices have further been enabled to provide mobile applications installed to facilitate the user of the devices to access and explore the functionalities of each of these mobile applications including social networking, e-commerce, and video games etc.
In order to access the mobile applications, the user may have to be authorized or authenticated by the mobile applications. Since, each mobile application is different and served by a distinct application server, the user has to be authorized or authenticated separately by each of these application servers for accessing each of these mobile applications. The authentication of the user may be facilitated based on login credentials like username and password provided by the user. However, since there may be numerous mobile applications, the user may face a challenge while providing the user's credentials for accessing each of these applications. Further, in certain scenario, the user's credentials may vary with each of the mobile applications and this may further lead to a challenge of memorizing a unique login credential for each of the mobile applications.
Single Sign On (SSO) techniques available today may enable accessing several mobile applications after authentication of the user only once at an instance of accessing a first mobile application of the several mobile applications. The SSO techniques follow a cookie based approach, wherein the cookie stores the login credentials on the device of the user, wherein the login credentials may be provided by the user during accessing the first mobile application which can be validated for accessing the subsequent mobile applications. However, the SSO techniques may be prone to attacks by the intruders since the login credentials are stored locally on the device. Further, the SSO techniques facilitate single sign on for the mobile applications that are hybrid in nature. These mobile applications, also referred as “Hybrid Mobile Applications,” may utilize the SSO techniques facilitating single sign on for the browser based applications. However, there are other classes or types of applications called “Native Mobile Applications” which are not browser-based, and hence may not support single sign on using these SSO techniques. Thus, there is a technical challenge to authenticate the user device accessing a plurality of mobile applications comprising a mixture of both the “Hybrid Mobile Applications” and the “Native Mobile Applications” without compromising on the data security and being susceptible to intruder attacks.